An important part of WIB since its inception has been our homebrewing community. We never cease to be amazed by the creativity, talent and sometimes utterly bizarre creations they come up with, using the ingredients from our shelves. We've often said we wish we could share the brews that make it to our monthly homebrew club with the rest of the world, so now we are!
The challenge for our homebrew club in November was winter warmers. As always, we had some really great beers on the day, both as part of the challenge and others. The favourites, as voted for by the homebrew club are below.
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Kat Sewell brought a beer using a yeast ‘Megablend’, which was different strains of yeast taken in by different brewers and collected by Brew Lab at Brew Con 2018 and then blended into one yeast.
Megablend
3000g Pilsner
1500g Wheat
500g Acidulated malt
40g Styrian Goldings at 60 minutes
20g Coriander seeds at 10 minutes
Megablend yeast 2018
Left to ferment for 6 months
10g golpar and a bottle of pomegranate mollases added in secondary in last month.
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Esther Arwert is back again! This time she brewed an alcoholic redcurrant kombucha, which was a nice change of pace on the day!
Hard Redcurrant Kombucha
I got a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) from a friend a couple of months ago and have been experimenting with "normal" kombucha. We also had a bumper harvest of redcurrants this year and I ran out of ideas what to do with them (redcurrant mead, redcurrant "sloe" gin, redcurrant gin jam, redcurrant jelly)... And my partner was getting annoyed with the last boxes of redcurrants in the freezer taking up space.... So, I decided to use them to experiment with creating a hard kombucha.
Make a normal Kombucha first (if you don't know anyone with a spare SCOBY: waterintobeer.co.uk sells kombucha kits)
- Make 3l strong tea (I used a mix of redbush + back tea)
- add 150g of sugar
- cool the tea
- add SCOBY
- cover with a clean teacloth and wait until you have a normal Kombucha
- This takes anywhere from 1 week (when warm) to 3 weeks (when kept at cooler temperatures) and depends on your taste - I stopped it a bit earlier than I'd normally do (I normally like it quite sour)
- at this stage you don't really have any alcohol in there (around 0.5-1%)
Remove the SCOBY and use it to start your next batch of Kombucha (SCOBY won't like the next steps and isn't needed)
- to finished kombucha add 450g of thawed slightly mashed redcurrants
- add an extra 100g of sugar - (I mashed it together with the redcurrants)
- 1/2 tsp of yeast nutrients
- add yeast (I used around 5g I had leftover from brewing the day before: safale-04)
- add airlock
- ...wait...
- after two weeks it's ready to bottle
- add vanilla bean pasta to taste to balance out the tartness (if there's sugar in there; adjust priming sugar)
- bottle with carbonation drops
- ready to drink a week later.
- serve chilled
ABV is around 3.5%
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Daniel Young and Mark Woolard attempted to brew an imperial stout, but a blown fermenter, after making a starter meant they missed the original gravity by 20 point, so they split the batch and added Brett to five litres of it, which was delicious. Never throw away your ‘mistakes’, just make them better. Or bretter.
‘Imperial’ Stout with Brett
Volumes:
24 litre boil, 16.5 litres in the fermenter.
Fermentables:
5kg Golden Promise
500g Caramunich
500g Chocolate
250g Biscuit
200g Golden Naked Oats
150g Black
Mash:
60 mins at 67c, 10 mins at 75c
Boil:
60 mins
700g Light Spraymalt
60 min - 60g Challenger, 20g Mosaic
15 min - 45g Willamette
Fermented on New World Ale. Split batch and added Brett to 5 litres.
O.G. 1.078
F.G. 1.016
ABV 8.3%
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Mike Acord brewed a great Mexican Mole stout, the very definition of a winter warmer!
Imperial Mexican Mole Stout
Fermentables:
150g roasted barley
460g chocolate malt
630g rye malt
1.15kg dark crystal
8kg Maris otter
Boil:
40g of chinook (se4 grown) @60 mins. 41.23g of fuggles @60 mins.
1 large ancho chili and 1 large mulato @15 mins 200g of dark chocolate powder @10 mins.
7 days before bottling add 1 cinnamon stick, 1 mulato chili and 66g of cacao nibs (after being soaked in 300g of spiced rum for 5 days).
Bottle and age. This can be drunk fresh too.